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The New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a new documentary about Melania Trump, which chronicles her life during the twenty days leading up to Donald Trump’s second Inauguration. They talk about the film’s glossy yet superficial portrait of the First Lady, who served as an executive producer, as well as its troubled rollout and poor critical reception. They also explore Melania’s tenure as First Lady and the contradictions at the center of her political identity as an immigrant married to a President whose anti-immigration rhetoric and policies have come to define both his Administration and the moment of the film’s release.

This week’s reading:

“ ‘Melania’ Is a Forty-Million-Dollar Journey Into the Void,” by Lauren Collins

“What a ‘Melania’ Cinematographer Hoped to Accomplish,” by Isaac Chotiner

“How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post,” by Ruth Marcus

“Why the D.H.S. Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable,” by Jonathan Blitzer

“Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion,” by David Kirkpatrick

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1968, Stewart Brand, a young hippie who had studied biology at Stanford, co-created the Whole Earth Catalog, a “do-everything-yourself compendium” that became a touchstone for both Bay Area counterculture and, eventually, Silicon Valley technologists. “Maintenance: Of Everything,” his new book, is a kind of spiritual descendant of the Catalog—a celebration of the practice of learning how things work and how to fix them. In the book, the first in a planned series, Brand argues that maintenance should be seen not as an “unrewarding chore” but as an essential driver of technological and scientific progress. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a few books that he drew on. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Perfectionists

by Simon Winchester

Amazon | Bookshop

One of the things that made it so fun to research my book was the way that it kept leading me to interesting digressions. One of those digressions was the history of interchangeable parts, which I embarked upon when I was writing about vehicles, and specifically about Henry Ford’s Model T—an eminently maintainable car, whose manufacture depended on its parts being truly interchangeable.

It turns out that the story of interchangeable parts is tied up with military innovation. In the late eighteenth century, English and French engineers had invented new ways of casting cannons that made them more uniform and more accurate. Applying that technique to James Watt’s steam engines made them efficient for the first time. The Industrial Revolution took off from there. Then the French started to standardize their muskets. At that time, muskets were all made by gunsmiths, and the parts of one couldn’t fit another—if a soldier’s firearm broke on the battlefield, he couldn’t fix it himself. A French gunsmith named Honoré Blanc devised a way to make each part of a gun to a standard model. When Thomas Jefferson, who served as the minister to France after the Revolutionary War, saw the interchangeable parts being deployed there, he became a promoter of them. That went on to influence the way that manufactured products were made in the U.S., and helped the country take the lead in the Industrial Revolution.

Winchester’s book really shows how precision helps to drive progress. For Watt, a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch made his steam engines efficient. In Ford’s day, engineers and manufacturers could be precise at the level of a millionth of an inch. Today, chip fabricators have gotten things down to five nanometres. And, as the saying goes, a nanometre is to a tennis ball as a tennis ball is to the whole earth.

The Scottish Enlightenment

by Arthur Herman

Amazon

At another point in my research for the book, I was looking at early versions of what might be called “manuals,” like Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which consists of hundreds of gorgeous illustrations and descriptions of how all the trades in France of that time worked. It’s a real display of the dignity of what we’d call blue-collar skills, and it shows how much was owed to them. Diderot was fierce about that, but with the end of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie completely fell away.

In Scotland, though, people were paying attention to it, and at a time when they were starting their own—the Encyclopædia Britannica. That became a huge event. It was part of a boom in rational discourse in Scotland. Herman’s book is a great account of this period of history, and maybe the best book about that particular Enlightenment that I have read.

Even though Scotland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, by the late sixteen-hundreds, Herman writes, it had become “Europe’s first modern literate society.” Scotland produced luminaries like David Hume, Adam Smith, James Watt, James Hutton, and Joseph Black. Institutions like the Encyclopædia Britannica speak to the spirit that helped create an environment where intellectuals like them could flourish.

The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

Amazon | Bookshop

This is a cosmically optimistic book. Deutsch basically says that we’re still in the Enlightenment discussed in Herman’s history. That’s because we live in a culture where we figure that problems are solvable, but then, when we discover explanations, we realize that there are always more problems. And we look for what he calls “good explanations,” which are explanations that open up more things you can do with your understanding, with your knowledge. For example, we had Newton, who gave us a way to understand gravity—but then that wasn’t good enough, there were still some things that didn’t fit, so we got to Einstein, who came up with space-time and all of that. This process goes on.

This book is very much in favor with tech people in the Bay Area. One of the peculiarities of this place, ever since the Gold Rush, is a kind of generalized optimism—an expectation that when you fail at something, that doesn’t doom your career. In fact, it may be instructive for the next thing. It’s a “just try stuff” mentality. So when someone like Deutsch, who is a quantum physicist at Oxford, says that the many universes we occupy can basically be bent toward improvement, toward potentially infinite progress, and that’s the way to think about things—of course, that’s going to be pretty welcome here.

In 2021, in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Sundance Film Festival went entirely online. When the in-person event resumed, in 2023, the online component continued, and it’s still going. However, not everything that’s screened at Sundance is available for home viewing; only the films in competition at the festival are required to be streamable, and only during a short window at the tail end of the festival. That’s how I saw many of the offerings in this year’s festival (which ended on Sunday), and, although I didn’t get to see some films that I’d been impatient for, I did see two that struck me as especially noteworthy—indeed, two of the most aesthetically distinguished Sundance films I’ve seen in recent years.

A good movie has disparate virtues but a great movie’s merits are comprehensive—a unity of style and drama, tone and theme, images and performances. That’s why a great film can be recognized from its first shot, and that’s how it is with “Filipiñana,” which I knew absolutely nothing about in advance and which grabbed me from the very beginning, announcing itself as a masterwork—which is all the more remarkable given that it’s the first feature by the Filipino director Rafael Manuel. It begins with a long and avid view from behind the front seats of a passenger van that is making its way along a busy, sun-drenched street in Manila. The action, energy, and color of the street life seen through the van’s broad windshield is framed so cannily that it seems choreographed—and nearly conceals the scene’s moment of drama, when a woman in the crowd signals to the driver and the van pulls over to pick her up. She turns out to be a hostess for the van’s passengers, a group of tourists headed to an upscale golf resort—and luxury tourism is the very premise of “Filipiñana.” The film performs a scalpel-sharp dissection of the industry, laying bare a mad microcosm of power relations—political, sexual, economic, familial, cultural, even linguistic—and the aesthetic of dominance that the resort, in Manuel’s discerning view, projects.

The rest of the movie takes place at the country-club complex and is centered on two young women there who never connect, one whose story entails a sharply defined dramatic conflict, the other whose presence is a source of mystery. The first is Clara (Carmen Castellanos), a twentysomething Filipina who lives in New York; she’s staying with her uncle Renato (Carlitos Siguion-Reyna), who owns the resort and is trying to persuade her to stay in Manila and help him run it. The second is Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), who is seventeen years old and a new member of the resort’s crew of “tee girls,” uniformed young women who work at the driving range, placing balls on the golfers’ tees; Isabel becomes increasingly, mysteriously, and ever more openly, obsessed with one particular golfer, Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), the president of the club.

Manuel’s approach to narrative is as original as his sense of cinematic form, and his gift for documentary-style observation is balanced by a refined sense of style. (He sketched this method and this story in a short film of the same title, which premièred at Sundance in 2020 and involves several of the same characters and actors.) The two women’s stories crystallize only gradually in the course of the feature, through the accretion of tiny details that, like the arrival of the hostess in the first shot, emerge amid a profusion of related distractions. Isabel, for instance, is introduced upside-down, lying on the grass, under the spray of one of the many sprinklers that water the course in a sort of mechanical ballet. (As she lies there, a little girl dashes by—one whose whereabouts will later become a major yet elusive plot point.) Renato is introduced by way of sunlight gleaming off what looks like the blade of a sword but turns out to be the shaft of a golf club. As for the tourists, their van pulls up, far in the background of a long shot that gazes through the grand lobby of the hotel—where, in the foreground, a small folk orchestra of blind musicians, accompanied by a dance troupe’s festive gyrations, provides a showy welcome.

The substance of “Filipiñana” is serious, even harsh, but its tone is wry and bittersweet. In this regard, as in the movie’s intricate tableau-like aesthetic, Manuel’s art is in the tradition of Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson. The many fixed-frame images (realized by the cinematographer Xenia Patricia) aren’t at all exemplars of so-called slow cinema, in which still frames distend action; rather, the effect that Manuel creates is crowded cinema—his compositions abound with activity of which the drama forms only a part. The end credits, teeming with his screen-packing array of golfers, dancers, staff, guests, and passersby, resemble a local phone book. The golf course and the hotel offer Manuel vast spaces to work with, in breadth and depth; the fixed frames lead the eye through those spaces in a way that suggests the interconnectedness of all that takes place within them. He delights in anything synchronized, whether mechanically or bodily, by design or by accident. A scene of workers stacking chairs in a ballroom brings to mind the giddy artistry of Jerry Lewis in “The Bellboy”; Chinese tourists, all clad in white, swing their clubs in synch on the driving range; and, as the tee girls sit in formation washing and restocking golf balls, their boss repeatedly declaims Chinese phrases that the tee girls repeat in unison, in preparation for interacting with the tourists. Manuel also jangles this apparent order with the striking visual trope of disorienting disproportions of scale—figures appearing unexpectedly small or large in the course’s expanses.

Amid these absurdities, Manuel coaxes out the cruelty of the resort’s hierarchies. In a sumptuous dining room, Dr. Palanca’s wife, a former Miss Universe, grouses about how her identity has been absorbed into her husband’s even as he’s carrying on brazenly with one of the course’s caddies. (The caddies, all young women, are often obliged to wade into one of the course’s water hazards and fish out golf balls, some of which are said to be resold for more than a resort worker makes in a day.) Isabel, sitting in a driving-range stall, is nearly hit with a ball when a clumsy golfer clangs it off a metal railing. Such scenes are framed in ways that call attention to the relentless labor that the resort extracts: in the background, trucks bring fresh trees that workers then plant on the course, caddies dash across the grounds as if being chased. When Dr. Palanca does karaoke for a group of guests, the camera pulls back from him to reveal the caddies, in peach-colored uniforms, arrayed behind him on stairs and a balcony to sway and clap along.

Music and dance are among the most demanding of cinematic subjects; even good choreography can be rendered banal by mediocre direction (see: Fred Astaire). The musical sequences in “Filipiñana”—not staged numbers but integral parts of the action—are filmed with filigreed flair, gathering infinitesimal gestures into choreographies of panoramic grandeur. These rise to sublime heights in a scene of a genteel rally for the reëlection of Dr. Palanca as the golf club’s president, which features a sinuously catchy campaign song, a suavely breathtaking dance, and, punctuating the spectacle, a piercing dramatic moment between the candidate and Isabel. In thinking about “Filipiñana,” I’d gladly just try to describe it in detail for the sheer pleasure of recollection. Its scenes are finely composed and precisely staged yet fluidly energetic. They are exemplary in their sensory beauty, in the delicately understated (and thus all the more powerful emotions) that they embody, in the world that they conjure, in the analytical insight that they unfold. With “Filipiñana,” Manuel opens new vistas in the future of the cinema.

Photograph by Benjamin Loeb / Courtesy “zi”

Another of the great first features—alongside which “Filipiñana” now takes its place—is “Columbus,” by Kogonada, which also premièred at Sundance, in 2017. It stars Haley Lu Richardson as a young woman in Columbus, Indiana, who has taught herself about the city’s treasure trove of modernist architecture—which Kogonada films with a visual fervor to match the protagonist’s passion. Since “Columbus,” Kogonada’s work has been on the downswing, with the substantial but hermetic “After Yang” (2021) and last year’s clumsy romantic fantasy “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.” As if radically repudiating the practical demands of those two studio productions, the film he premièred at this year’s Sundance, titled “zi,” was made secretly, rapidly, and spontaneously, in Hong Kong, with a tiny production crew (the cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, the sound recordist Bone Chan, and just a few others) and a core cast of just three actors. The title character, Zi, a Hong Kong-born concert violinist, is played by Michelle Mao; Richardson plays Elle, who has come to Hong Kong looking to change her life, leaving behind a career as a dancer in New York; and Jin Ha plays Min, a medical researcher who was born in Korea and raised in Hong Kong.

The spareness of the production is reflected both in the movie’s aesthetic and in its story: it takes place almost entirely outdoors, and it’s intensely, concentratedly realistic—with a wondrous asterisk. In its contours, “zi” is a gloss on a classic—Agnès Varda’s 1962 drama “Cléo from 5 to 7,” about a singer who wanders through Paris for two hours while awaiting the results of a medical test for cancer. In “zi,” the eponymous protagonist is also awaiting, albeit overnight, the results of a medical test that may reveal a tumor. Her symptoms, however, are unusual: when Zi walks in the city, she intermittently sees herself in the future, a near-future that seems to be receding ever further ahead. Fearful that she’s losing her mind, Zi sits and sobs on a long public staircase and is consoled by a stranger—Elle, whose face she has indeed already seen in her mind’s eye. Elle insists on keeping Zi company and on bringing her to meet her ex-boyfriend, who works at the medical center where Zi was tested. It’s Min, of course, whose presence Zi has likewise foreseen.

Min has an idea of what could be going on: it involves “temporal relativism,” and the conceit is so clever that I dare not spoil it. Suffice to say that Zi’s condition may not be a physical issue or even a mental one but, rather, a metaphysical state. Kogonada’s inspiration is to render this mystery poetic, political, and, above all, incontrovertibly material, in a way as distinctive as the architectural realm of “Columbus.” In that first feature, Kogonada, like the protagonist, raptly contemplated buildings as works of art, public expressions of auteur-like personalities. In “zi,” he films the face of a city no less ardently, but he does so in the way that the characters experience it—not as individual works but as architecture in the aggregate, in its functional context, as part of an urban fabric made up of planned and unplanned elements. The movie’s vision is one of arrangements and connections, stylistic and textural clashes of hulking buildings, stark forms seen in distant vistas, sublime coincidences of collective energy thrumming from generation to generation in the simultaneity of the physical city’s chronological strata.

Kogonada exults in escalators and staircases, alleys and corridors—how they appear to his trio of passersby and how they frame his trio, too. He delights in the show of street life as seen from the windows of buses and streetcars, the walkways of a steep hillside cemetery, the glitter of lights across the sea, the brutalist swoops of a concrete highway ramp and the walkway beneath it—and the personal connections that these spatial jumbles foster. Moreover, he finds a metaphor for his visual world and its temporal essence that stretches his aesthetic into another, surprising dimension. Elle has become a collector of sounds, wandering the city with a pocket recorder in hand, creating what are, in effect, sonic images of instants stretched out into time. The condition afflicting Zi is an essentially urban one, a disruption that comes off as hypersensitivity to a phenomenon—the omnipresence of history—so basic and so prominent that it’s generally overlooked, and which the movie camera, when wielded by a filmmaker as alert to it as Kogonada, is built to capture. ♦

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2013, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign staff will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”

The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.) In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”

It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration. During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.

Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.” The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.

I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.

But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth. Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.

Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”) At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.

The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.

Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024. It’s now offering bargain-basement pricing—digital subscriptions for less than fifty cents a week—but its subscriber base is under three million.

“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”

Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)

Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa. These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.

The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”

Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”

Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”

At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”

Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.” My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper. “Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦

In June, 1994, I took the F train out to Coney Island to root for my friend Phil, who was skating, solo, in the Gay Games. From the bleachers of the Abe Stark Arena, our college friends cheered wildly as Phil, who was a novice, performed a few simple spins. But the most startling event was the couples competition, which featured a pair of male skaters, dressed in camouflage, with tape over their mouths in an “X”—a direct protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The couple who followed them—two shirtless men, around the same height, alternately lifting each other up and rolling over each other with playful, affectionate aggression—struck me as equally political, suggesting not just what was banned but what was possible. It was like watching two trees dance.

In the short documentary “Icebreakers,” Jocelyn Glatzer and Marlo Poras explore the legacy of the Gay Games, nearly half a century after the institution was founded, in 1982, as an all-embracing extension of—and also a challenge to—the Olympics. Their film is built around a handful of key figures, including the renowned coach Wade Corbett (who trained Phil, back in 1994) and the lesbian skater Laura Moore, a cheerful firecracker who began her career after nearly twenty years in the closet. She sums up ice skating, crisply, as “a very gay sport” and “a very homophobic sport.”

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Glatzer and Poras dramatize that tension through interviews with Joel Dear and Christian Erwin, who teamed up for the couples competition at the 2018 Gay Games, in Paris, and Mark Stanford, a Black gay skater with H.I.V. Many of the obstacles these athletes face are institutional. Russia, where even discussing L.G.B.T.Q.+ identity is illegal, dominates Olympic-level skating; few pros are “out,” for fear of hurting their marketability. And, as Corbett notes, traditional figure skating hinges on a vision of heterosexual romance that’s both erotic and formulaic: a glittery princess tossed in the air, spun by a powerful man. This model gets into the head of gay competitors, too. After years of skating with a female partner, Dear felt “uneasy” skating with a man. When Erwin told his mother of his plan, she said, “Isn’t that a family show?”

There have been encouraging developments since “Icebreakers” was shot: the U.K., following the lead of Finland and Canada, has agreed to let same-sex couples compete on a national level. The success of “Heated Rivalry,” a Canadian TV series about closeted hockey players, has made these issues visceral (and hot) to a mainstream audience. But watching the film, with its dizzying montage of skaters—raw amateurs and sleek pros, swishy and butch, comedic and sincere, boldly solo and intimately paired—made me crave more than baby steps. Hearing Dear speak about his anxieties, then seeing him glide across the ice, tenderly, in tandem with Erwin, took me back to 1994, and to the sensation of witnessing something truly new: a liberation available to everyone, even those up in the bleachers.